Longtime Obama administration political insider David Axelrod claimed on Monday that the Obama administration hasn't been tainted by a smidgen of scandal.

The surprising boast came during a Q&A at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, an organization he founded and leads.

'I'm proud of the fact that basically you have had an administration in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,' Axelrod said. 'And I think that says a lot about the ethical strictures of this administration.'

Audio and video of Axelrod's remarks indicate the audience's first reaction to his insistence that Obama has presided over a scandal-free government was a chorus of laughs – before friendly attendees quickly drowned them out with applause.

Conservatives have made a parlor game out of cataloging the Obama White House's scandals, with tallies running into the dozens and some organized alphabetically.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEOS

GREEN CARDS: Millions of illegal immigrants will have IDs and become mainstreamed into the US population under a policy Obama put into place without input from Congress, sparking a Constitutional-crisis scandal

A leaked slideshow about the National Security Agency snooping on domestic Internet traffic grew into a major international scandal in 2013

Among the administration's earliest media firestorms was its green-energy loan guarantees to Solyndra and other alternative-energy companies. Solyndra ultimately defaulted on $527 million in loans that the federal government guaranteed, leaving taxpayers on the hook for the money.

In April 2009 a White House official green-lighted a photo-op that featured Air Force One, Obama's private plan, doing a flyby in New York City past the Statue of Liberty. Panicked New Yorkers flooded the streets thinking another 9/11-style aircraft attack was underway.

Also early in his presidency – on Day One – was a pledge to shut down the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That effort has led to 115 prisoner releases, including several later confirmed to have re-entered hostilities against the West.

Last year the president traded five high-value Taliban detainees for the safe return of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who is now expected to be charged with desertion for walking away from his Afghanistan post in 2009.

Military veterans who return home under more typical circumstances were shocked to learn in 2014 that dozens were dying for lack of medical care through the Veterans Administration health system.

Share this article

REMEMBER SOLYNDRA? $527 million later, the company is bankrupt and US taxpayers had to cover itsload defaults

The Internal Revenue Service, Americans' most feared and loathed government agency, has had a bumper crop of scandals since Obama took office.

In May 2013 an inspector general report found that the agency spent more than $4.1 million on a single conference in California that included six-figure fees for speakers and expensive video production for a corny Star-Trek themed humor video.

The General Services Administration was caught in a similar conference scandal later that year over an $823,000 in Las Vegas training conference held in 2010. It featured mind-readers, a clown and lavish hotel suites with jacuzzis. The GSA administration resigned over the flap.

Also in May 2013, the IRS was plunged into scandal over news that its Tax-Exempt Organizations section was subjecting Tea Party groups and conservative-oriented charities to intrusive screening and years-long delays before granting them tax-exempt status – while liberal groups were often given a pass.

The IRS later claimed to Congress that years worth of emails belonging to retired official Lois Lerner, who is thought to be responsible, were destroyed in a hard drive crash.

Americans had a civil-liberties awakening in June 2013 that grew into an international scandal, when former government contractor Edward Snowden fled the country with untold amounts of stolen data and gave journalists evidence of a massive global eavesdropping program run by the National Security Agency.

Called Project PRISM, its tentacles reached into industry, private citizens' emails and even the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Outrage over the program put the NSA on a tighter congressional leash.

'WHAT DIFFERENCE ... DOES IT MAKE?' Hillary Clinton's State Department still has questions pending about Benghazi, and the former secretary of state was never interviewed by investigators

The White House's own black eyes continued with other revelations related to domestic spying on American citizens, including members of the press.

The Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder, it was revealed, had tapped the phones of Associated Press reporters and scoured emails belonging to a Fox News Channel correspondent, all without notifying the affected news organizations.

The ensuing scandal forced Holder to convene apologetic meetings with journalists and news executives in which he and his deputies pledged to follow a more transparent route in the future when dealing with the Fourth Estate.

The attorney general was already reeling from a series of revelations about Operation Fast and Furious, a failed effort to track illegal U.S. gun sales to Mexican drug lords that resulted in hundreds of deaths south of the border and the killing of at least one U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry.

Holder's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives instructed legitimate gun dealers to sell illegal quantities of rifles, shotguns and handguns to 'straw buyers,' whom they knew would take the guns into Mexico for use by narcotics cartels.

Of the 2,100 guns trafficked into Mexico in this fashion, just over 700 were recovered.

Holder was held in Contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents subpoenaed by lawmakers. He was also accused of committing perjury when he claimed in a congressional hearing that he had only learned about Fast and Furious weeks earlier. Documents later proved otherwise.

President Obama's Affordable Care Act was a signature legislative accomplishment but remains shrouded in controversy and scandal.

The Benghazi siege killed a US ambassador; the Obama White House initially spun the terror attack as an out-of-control protest over a YouTube video

After the president pledged dozens of times that Americans who liked their existing health insurance plans could keep them under his new system, millions found themselves with cancellation letters because their older policies fell short of the government's minimum requirements.

Those included birth-control and breast cancer coverage for men and prostate exams for women on single-person policies.

Obamacare also became a punchline when billions of dollars failed to produce a working website in the fall of 2013 when open-enrollment for government-brokered medical insurance policies opened up. By then, the administration had already angered members of Congress by unilaterally pushing back implementation dates that were written into the law he signed.

Some of those impromptu delays pushed back key outcomes – including the massive wave of insurance policy cancellations – until after the 2012 election.

In late 2014 the GOP got another chance to raise a ruckus about the Obamacare law when its self-proclaimed 'architect' Jonathan Gruber was caught on video saying that it only passed Congress because of 'the stupidity of the American voter.'

Overseas, the administration's role in failures related to the September 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi is still the subject of scandal, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton eyeing a presidential run of her own.

Under Clinton, the State Department refused to provide added security for the diplomatic compound that would later be firebombed and attacked in a coordinated paramilitary assault, killing three Americans including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

Afterward, with a presidential election just weeks away, Obama and Clinton both claimed the attack was the product of a spontaneous escalation of protests related to a crude YouTube video that mocked the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Protests in other countries throughout the Arab world did take place after the film was publicized online.

FIVE-FOR-ONE: Obama consoled Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's parents at the White House after giving away five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo to get him home, but the soldier's comrades later said he was a deserter

But the Benghazi attack, it emerged after the election, was planned and executed by Ansar al-Shariah, an affiliate of al-Qaeda.

A scandal-within-a-scandal erupted when ti was proven that the CIA and White House insiders both edited a set of 'talking points' used by the administration to brief Congress and talk to reporters.

Those changes removed all references to the Islamist and jihadi groups that intelligence officials knew were responsible.

Some analysts believe Obama's re-election was cinched when an ABC News anchor incorrectly said during a debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney that the president had called the event a 'terrorist attack' the day after it occurred.

RIP: US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down by a Mexican drug cartel member who was armed with an Operation Fast and Furious rifle that US government supplied

Clinton later raised senators' hackles when she asked 'What difference does it make?' whether or not the deadly attack was the careful work of terrorists.

More recently the president's executive actions on immigration have become the stuff of scandal intense enough to spur federal lawsuits filed by 26 sitting governors and the Republican-led House of Representatives.

Obama has begun already to offer green cards and work permits to millions of people who were brought to the United States illegally as children. He has proposed to expand that program dramatically, guaranteeing millions more that they won't be deported during his term in office.

A federal judge on Monday night blocked that plan – which Obama himself said more than 20 times he lacked to legal authority to carry out – but the final say will rest with the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court.

Other more minor blips on America's scandal radar since 2009 included former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson using a private email address – complete with an alias – to conduct agency business. Those emails, unlike messages archived from official government accounts, weren't subject to retention policies and could not be subpoenaed.

Obama was also hammered for appointing Timothy Geithner as his first Treasury Secretary, since Geithner had failed to pay his own taxes years earlier.

And in January 2012 he created a scandal by making presidential 'recess appointments' of key personnel who required congressional approval while Congress was still in session. The move allowed his appointees to serve for a year without being confirmed on Capitol Hill.

Four federal courts later ruled that the actions were unconstitutional, including a unanimous 9–0 Supreme Court ruling.